At the start of the episode, I wasn’t kidding about disabling V-Sync in the PC version of the game. The level loading is apparently linked to framerate in some convoluted way, so by disabling V-Sync my loading times went from 50 seconds to 10.

I like the “Big Bro” brand security cameras at the start of the episode. That’s actually a little comical for a world this grim, but it managed to wring a smile out of me.

The side of Malik’s airship says “800 B-EE”. The first time I saw it I read it as “BooBee”, which made me giggle in juvenile way. Someone please tell me I’m not the only one, or I’ll be ashamed to have confessed this.

I named my son Joshua. My middle initial is C. As was my father’s. So we came up with a unique name that started C. Everything was fine.

Fast forward some 15 to 16 years. A friend comments that was a hell of burden to put on a kid with that name. WTF? “J.C.”, he commented. Oops, christen-babble always sneaks up on me. I do Zen not Christ.

I think they may have changed the model texture after the pre-rendered cut scenes, yet didn’t bother to redo those scenes. It’s odd, as the only reason you would presume for them to do so would be because it could be read as BOOBEE, yet didn’t seem to care enough that it was already visible at some points in the game.

Hmm, I’m still not sure about the v-sync thing — I don’t disbelieve you, but I’m more inclined to believe coincidence in this situation. I too heard about long loading screens, in several posts before I actually bought the game for myself. They released a patch that supposedly fixed the length (dunno what they optimized); I always run with v-sync (CAN’T stand tearing), and the loading screens were quite short (definitely shorter than the posts I was reading had mentioned).

The point was that Shamus’s original comment about disabling vsync was made after I had bought (and beaten) the game, which puts it after that patch that supposedly fixed it. As I didn’t have any problems with load times, I find it to be coincidental.

ALSO, the very definition of vsync (synchronizing the framerate to your monitor’s refresh rate) doesn’t make any sense dealing with loading times. It’s a purely play-time thing, unless they’re pre-rendering everything (which wouldn’t work so well in a game situation).

I can easily imagine a game system that would speed up loading times depending on the screen refresh rate. Just have a game logic update called each frame (with an indicator of the real time elapsed since the last logic update to keep real time behaviour correct). Have a loading system that loads a fixed amount of stuff per update that is tuned for low end systems, and on high end systems (or good disk access rates) and it will finish its workload in a short time spend a fair bit of each update idling waiting for the next vsync. Or, if you have disabled vysnc, it gets straight on with the next update and so gets through the workload a lot faster.

It’s hard to show evidence since it’s allegedly patched out now, but disabling VSynch sped up my load times tremendously as well, having played around release. I too have no clue why it would matter, though.

Curious that Josh still seems to suffer from aeons-long loadscreens though.

On release, what happened was that even after loading was done, it’d still try to finish playing the animations. The same kind of stupidity is with ME2 I believe, where replacing load screens made the game load much faster simply because the stupid “load animations” took longer than our computers needed to load.

I only just noticed this now, but one of the buildings that gets flown over during the cutscene at the very beginning has an “Eidos Montreal” sign. Which is cute, although I wish it didn’t have the wrong city name.

Another weird thing about V-sync. Disableing fixed the annoying slowdown issues I had during the pre-rendered cutscenes.”
No clue how that’s supposed to work. Maybe the game is also adding ugly gold coloured effects over those, I dunno.

Also, I’m really confused as to what the problem Rutskarn had with shooting the tranq-rifle from cover was. Just pop out, get the baddy’s head in your scope and fire (exactly like Josh did at 13:39). Pretty standard modern shooter stuff.

My problem was that I hadn’t gotten the hang of the popup mechanics yet. I play popup shooters very rarely, and this game had a new approach to it. I was shooting from cover “blindfiring” instead of popping out. I got a handle on the controls once I got inside the warehouse, but by then I’d moved to the pistol. The second time through the game, I had the stun gun, so I never really gave the tranq rifle a chance.

Oh, now I get you meant.
Yeah, I can easily see how you can get confused at first and end up fireing blind, if you skipped the tutorial (not that I can blame you when the damned thing start with such gems like “press the fire key to fire your weapon”) or if using the movement keys to pop out and/or using the scope whenver possible doesn’t feel more natural to you.

I thought the tranq rifle added a delicious new layer to the gunplay and stealth. It’s not a hit-scan weapon and combined with the target leading upgrade (I forget what it’s called exactly) it allows you to pull off some amazing long distance shots that are very satisfying when done right. Add to the fact that there’s often a delayed reaction and that it’s probably the most silent weapon in the game. Personally I had great fun sneaking around finding the best position to quickly be able to take out consecutive targets before the first one hit the ground.

Tranq rifle was probably my favourite weapon as well; excellent stealth, and it was amusing later on to shoot two people in a room before the first felt the effects, and then just watch them both pass out while hiding.

It did take ages to work on the spec ops ogres though; I always underestimated how long it would take to drop one of them.

Activate the upgrade (hold E), scope in and keep it centered around the guy’s head. After a second or two, a circle pops up, which moves in accord to the target’s movements. Aim at the center of that circle and you’ll score a headshot.

is Gears of war the first cover shooter? if so, blind-firing has existed from the first and ive seen it in pretty well every game that has cover since. i think even red orchestra 2 – which is first person – has a blind-firey type mechanic.

Gears of War was most certainly not the first Cover-based shooter. And, in my opinion, blindfire has existed ever since the introduction of iron sights. Shooting any weapon from the hip in call of duty is considered blind fire by yours truly.

I almost never used stun gun or tranq rifle in the original. I almost always use baton, dragon tooth sword (it so fun one-hit killing MIB:s with that (remember to run away!)), silenced pistol and silenced sniper rifle. And the GEP gun to open stuff that you don’t have the key for. :-)

Now why did you have to go and mention the Dragon Tooth Sword?
I was saving up my ire for when Josh used the melee-system for the first time. But now you went and caught me with my pants down.
*sigh*
I hate the melee-system in this game so frigging much. Don’t get me wrong; pulling stunts like this is pretty sweet looking.
But a litle cutscene just isn’t the same as wacking someone over the head yourself instead. Dear Ao, when you fail at something even Invisible War got right you ought to sit down in a corner and think about what you did for a while.

I found the melee in the original to be incredibly frustrating. Here I am, a highly trained agent with high hand-to-hand skills, but a guy can circle-strafe me from a range of about 2 feet and I have a lot of difficulty actually trying to smack him in the head.

Now, this could just be my ineptitude with the controls, but to be honest I was quite happy with HR’s push-button-and-win melee system. I much prefer the challenge of sneaking around the room to get into a good position on a guy than the act of smacking him in the head when I get there.

True; the melee was ok if you got the drop on them (and possibly strength enhancements).

I think my main problem is that hand-to-hand combat is incredibly dynamic, and it’s quite hard to represent that in the game without making it much more of a focus of the game (i.e. Tekken). In real life, if a person is about 30 degrees to your left you don’t have to turn left 30 degrees and then swing your arm in a vertical arc, like JC with the baton

The part of the game that really cemented my hatred of the close combat was just after you’d been captured and taken to the MJ-12 base. No equipment except what you’ve managed to scavenge from the level, and to get your main equipment back you had to take out a guy in the armoury who was seated facing the door as you came in. I didn’t have any ranged weapons, so my only option was to charge across the room and smack him with the baton. It went… poorly.

Once you got the Dragon’s Tooth close combat was noticably better, partly for the one shot and partly because I think it was a horizontal swing which covered a bit more ground.

I can’t say I ever really gave it a thought before now, but now that you mention it, whenever I play a game without it, I get this vague mental picture of my character zooming around on some kind of Tom Servo hover-skirt.

Definitely annoying. If it’s minor I can get used to it after a while and stop noticing it at which point the game effectively becomes the same as one without view bobbing, but I always immediately check options to see if I can turn it off from the get go. More extreme examples can put me off playing the game.

Yes and no. I like a little bit of view bobbing, to show that I’m actually a character walking, rather than a cameraman zooming around on a Segway.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas had no view bobbing at all, which felt wrong. But Deus Ex: HR has too much, which isn’t good either. Skyrim actually has the appropriate amount. Very slight view bobbing to show that you are in fact a person and not a robot on wheels, but not Gears of War-roadie-run-oh-god-I’m-going-to-puke-much.

Does the camera bob change if you get the augs to reduce movement penalties to shooting? I never bothered with that aug as it didn’t seem that useful to me, but I’d be curious to know if it changed this.

I’ll be completely honest, the scene where Malik crashes her helicopter and you have the choice to save her or go on made me go lethal instantly and wipe all of those mofos out. I was so close to beating the game without killing a single person, but when they started nuking that chopper, I went completely ballistic with the Typhoon boogie (I’d saved up Praxis kits and aug-points for whatever challenge came next).

I’ve heard people argue that Malik is a lot like Tali in that she’s basically engineered to be an ego-boost for the player, and that’s why they’re both so popular, but I haven’t played through the game since I heard that argument, so I can’t say for myself. Does anyone have a comment on that?

First of all: you do realise that if you got yourself close enough (fast enough) to get in effective typhoon-range, you could have just knocked them out, right?

Anyway; Malik is set up to be a character who the player likes. You can make the argument that BioWare also wants you to like Tali, but that’s where any reasonable comparison ends.
Tali – especially in the second game – is filled with pandering to the creepy subsections of BioWare-fandom. Sure, there are some elements of nerd-bait in Malik, but nothing really obvious.

At least in Malik’s emails (if you’re creepy enough to break into her office and read her emails :D ) she isn’t set out to be a naturally nerdy sort of stereotype and has the whole young thing going out for a night on the town style going on

Oh man, I just got to that point in the game, and it’s driving me batty. And I had to edit out most of this post because I don’t know how to get that highlighting/spoiler effect, and I don’t want to ruin things for people.

“I'll be completely honest, the scene where Malik crashes her helicopter and you have the choice to save her or go on made me go lethal instantly and wipe all of those mofos out. I was so close to beating the game without killing a single person, but when they started nuking that chopper, I went completely ballistic with the Typhoon boogie (I'd saved up Praxis kits and aug-points for whatever challenge came next).

Impressive: this is exactly what happened to me as well, down to every little detail (including purchasing the Typhoon on the spot).

As for Malik vs. Tali, I don’t see any similarity between them besides the fact that they’re both females in sci-fi RPGs. Malik is warm and friendly, but she can handle herself, calls you out if you try some bullshit, and has a life that doesn’t revolve around you in the slightest; in general, her interactions with Jensen are always healthy and mature, which is a breath of fresh air in the medium. Tali fawns over you all the time in a way one frankly wouldn’t expect or tolerate in any girl past puberty (in ME2; in ME1 she was a somewhat awkward but quite self-reliant person. The writers just shat all over her in the transition, perhaps to karma-balance Liara who went through an opposite but equally silly transformation.)

I just played this and I nearly walked away thinking that it was impossible to do nonlethal, and then a friend heckled me about it and I went back and did it right.

It’s a HUGE pain in the arse but that section is totally possible with just tranqs, the stun gun, takedowns and 1 emp – because that’s what I had and I didn’t want to go back and change my loadout. It was very satisfying when I pulled it off.

… and then I went back and did it again a few times, because one of the b*stards kept walking too close to the box guard and dying when it blew up!

Regarding the hyper-active dialogue animations, I didn’t think they were that bad (even though they are noticeable). It’s a bit like they have recently learnt how to create reasonably realistic looking animation so they have a need to do as much of it as possible. In the next decade or so they might learn to do subtle animations too.

I was one of those who took too long to get to the helipad. I ignored the chiding from Sarif since nothing usually happens when you doodle in these games (and nothing ever happens after this event as far as I could see). I just listened to all conversations, did everything I could possibly do. Listened to these tourist information things in the entry area, etc. I really dislike being punished for taking my time and explore the game.

This is one of the dilemmas faced by game designers at present. Game NPCs have said ‘urgent’ when it’s not for so long that it’s more difficult to actually convey ‘no, really, urgent’ without an explicit timer.

I like the attempt, though. It bothers me to have a dichotomy between the correct hero response vs. the correct playing-a-hero response. If someone is at risk of life and limb in reality, a hero will perform the minimum necessary preparations before going after them. If a game tells me someone is at risk of life and limb and my heroic character does the same, turns out that I’m a sucker and I “should have” ignored my comrade’s plight to meander down every hallway and explore every room for a secret collectible or power-up.

But the more I play, the more I’m trained to treat games according to “game rules”… so anyone who switches it up and doesn’t follow the same pattern that other games have in the past, has a good chance of leaving me feel tricked.

I feel like this problem can be circumvented by establishing the urgency rule early on. Preferably with lower stakes than a building full of hostages, since most players would probably count on the usual game rules and fail the deadline the first time around. In this case, for example, Sarif could eventually leave so you wouldn’t get the weapon choice. You know, something that you can “afford” to fail.

Well, in an open world designed to be explored, the right answer is to start the game in a non-crisis situation. Allow the player to explore to their hearts content. That way when the crisis begins, you’ve got it out of your system. Of course, this makes it possible that the player will miss the trigger and just sit around wondering “what am I doing here?”

Agreed. Games cite false urgency so often that its expected. A few escalating events with a hidden timer would help. Even just stuff like people waiting in your office go back to their desks after a bit. Something to show the player they aren’t joking when you hear “Hurry!”

That room with the hostages and the bomb,if you wait for more than 15 minutes,youll find just corpses.If you wait less,you can defuse the bomb.One of the hostages,also,is the husband of that manager lady,and her conversation differs as well.And the conversations you have with the swat guys.

Im sure Mumbles will be the one seeing boobies just like you Shamus,so dont worry.

Also one other nice nod is when you talk to pritchard about hacking all the computers in the building.

Its also quite easy to lose the 15 minutes required for the hostages to die if you go around,talk with everyone,listen to people talking on the phone,etc.Its also refreshing to have a game where when someone tells you to hurry up because lives are on the line,he isnt just saying that,and lives really are on the line.

On my first (and so far only) playthrough I missed the deadline and decided that Id play through not quickloading and instead suffering the consequences of my actions. That lasted until about the point when Sanders somehow manages to escape the building despite shooting the hostage the second he waltzes out the door. And then evades the entire SWAT team by closing a door behind him.

Yeah, I accidentally got the hostages killed. I was strolling around the lobby at Sarif industries thinking that “hurry” probably didn’t mean “time limit”. Turns out I was wrong, when they announced that all the hostages were killed! Woops! Maybe I should have spent less time dicking around with the janitor.

Thinking about it I think that what bugs me about that time limit is manyfold:

* The time limit is completely arbitrary and bears no actual relation to the game. Why couldn’t they bring you to the office 45 minutes earlier so that you have 1 hour to fool around?

* They dump you in a place that has lots of interesting bits to explore. So the developers are really telling the player two conflicting messages: “Here is a large building for you to explore” and “Stop exploring and hurry, people are going to die soon!”.

* There is only one little bit that is hit by the time limit. I can wait around for hours without anything else happening like the last remaining hostage dying or the Typhoon-stealing guy gets away with whatever it is he is doing, etc. When you notice this, you realise that the world isn’t so dynamic as they pretended it to be with that time limit.

* It’s a single-player-game. Why is there really such a need to hurry? Why can’t I play at my own pace?

So what I am trying to say here is that a developer should think carefully before using time limits to hurry the player up.

Note that if the game-world was actually dynamic I would have found this much easier to buy. I.e. the terrorists state of mind are tracked, you can (indirectly) interact with them to stall them. For example by telling the police squads to use stalling tactics, maybe even talk to the terrorists directly and other means. And if you bug the police too much they might get impatient and storm the place themselves etc.

I like having the music’s title given, but even more I like the reference to the ME2 season (which happens to be where I started watching SW): smooth jazz over the opening cutscene of your character dying. I’m surprised to see no one else commenting on that.

Forsooth, I have changed my mind, and now the music seems well suited – mostly I think it’s because the credits are now filled with ridiculous moments of Cuftbertian prowess, instead of Jensen just walking a lot.

Another little thing I like about the game is that if you go around all the offices to loot them, Adam gets emails about a “thief” that’s been going around the office.
Sadly, I hear the thief got away.

I also went Tranquilizer Rifle on my first playthrough. My only problem with the gun is that by the end I had like 5 times more Stun Gun ammo than Tranquilizer Darts. I had to switch to the Stun Gun, which is equally useful but not as satisfying imo.

I also vastly prefer this conversation wheel. that may be because they also give a brief quote that comes from exactly what you’re going to say if you go over it. They don’t paraphrase anything.

This. It’s also just so much more satisfying gameplay wise. I only used the stun gun or tranq rifle when short battery power or if I felt like I couldn’t get behind their backs and/or reasonably close enough otherwise.

Oh, when I got that “thief” email I started to read it and was like “okay, there’s gonna be another little sidequest that is going to take me some time but I’ll have to do it because I’m a completionist like that and… waitaminute…” at this point I got to the part about office thefts, there was a lol. I actually never replayed it so I don’t know, do you get it even if you don’t actually take stuff from the offices? I mean, logically you shouldn’t but it’s a game so you never know…

I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it, because early onto the game I realised I was breaking into people’s rooms and stealing their stuff, so I stopped and only looted in bad guys bases. I was pretty impressed the game convinced me enough to make me care

Following the video!
——
It’s because his vision is augmented, Josh.
Pritchard will call you out upon a visit to the women’s room.
The popping out of cover has the alternative effect of giving you partial cover, even as you shoot. Of course, this is negated by the fact that most enemies will start shooting at your head.
Tranq rifle has ballistics! :p
You missed the candy bar!
You get more info out of the SWAT, that’s about it, really.
Can you see the dart in the back of his head?
Hmm. I just realized my breakdown of your first meeting with Barrett is wrong.

Anyway, it is possible to completely stealth tranq the first room, but it’s annoying as heck.

It might just be me being a non American, but it sounds like EVERYBODY EVER says the name Megan wrong. Everyone knows it should be Mehg-an, not May-gan. This was possibly the single biggest immersion breaker in the game, and it’s not like I hear the name that often IRL either..

I don’t live in the Midwest, and the States varies in pronunciation quite a bit regionally, but here in Southern California at least the name Megan is very common and is typically pronounced “May-gen.”

I’m probably going to play through this game again just so I can remember it a bit better while watching these videos, so I have a question. How scarce is non-lethal ammo? I maybe want to do a non-lethal playthrough but not if it makes the game a chore to play.

Depends.I think you are able to find ~50 tranq darts in the first level,so if you use them accurately,youll ahve at least half of that.So its possible to always have 10+ darts with you.Stun gun darts seem a bit more common though.

But,if you go for the takedown route,you wont have to worry about that.

So, I suspect I may just have had a totally unique mental blind spot going on at the beginning of this first mission, but I’m curious as to whether anyone else experienced the same confusion. I had about a half-hour of frustration figuring out how to get through the entrance to that first building. I hadn’t picked up that the entry building wasn’t the “real” factory yet, and somehow the visual cues that those figures standing at the end of the hall were just cops didn’t leap out to me as important. So I thought they were supremely unfairly-placed enemy guards, and I couldn’t figure out how to sneak attack the first one without getting promptly killed by the two others…it was a while before I realized they didn’t attack me on sight. It just never occurred to me that they weren’t bad guys. I’m still not sure if this was something odd in the level design or some kind of stupidity unique to my brain. I found the design of most of the rest of the game to be absolutely wonderful.

I was kind of startled, but then I thought “Malik wouldn’t drop me in a hostile LZ” so I just walked up to them. Turns out they didn’t try to kill me!
But yeah, I was a bit hesitant. Same with the gangsters near the LZ later in the game.

Character animations: I TOTALLY agree. It’s really immersion breaking how, if Jensen and another NPC are sitting together on a couch, Jensen will look at everywhere BUT the person he’s talking to. Seriously, Eidos should have taken some pointers about how to make realistic body language animations from Dragon Age, which still strikes me as having some of the most realistic and natural looking animations (and lip synching) I’ve ever seen in a video game. Even modern offerings like Skyrim still fall short of that standard (where their facial emotions look frozen).

Dialogue wheel: I don’t know… I actually liked the old, original style of choosing dialogue in Bioware games (and similar RPGs), where the entire text of what you’re going to say is laid out for you. My major gripe with the dialogue wheel used in Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 is the fact that the subtext for each option does not always correspond to what you actually wanted to say. For instance, you could pick an option that sounds like it’ll be smartass, but your character delivers the line in a way that makes them sound like an asshole instead.

The DX:HR system works, however, because it’s not a true RPG. Rather, Adam Jensen is his own solidly defined character. You are NOT Adam Jensen; you’re merely choosing which path he follows through the game. Therefore, in situations like the conversation with Pritchard, it’s less a decision of “what do I want Adam to be” and more a “do I want Adam to be curt and dismissive or angry and confrontational? In both cases, you can’t choose to be a nice guy and try to work out your differences with Pritchard, which is probably one approach a true RPG would allow you to take.

Hostages Dying: I never actually got around to testing this, but I believe the trigger for the hostages dying is after you talk to a certain number of NPCs. You get a reminder at one point from Sarif saying, “Hey, where the hell are you? Get your butt down here!”. If you ignore that warning and keep going around talking to more NPCs, then the second event is triggered which makes the hostages die when you arrive at the factory.

Tranq Rifle: I found the tranquiliser rifle nearly impossible to use without the Target Leading mod you can get for it later. (Of course, when I use the Tranq rifle and the Sniper rifle, I’m doing so at extreme ranges, not at the distances that Josh was using it at.) The arcing trajectory of the darts is just too tricky to get right against moving targets (which 80% of the enemies in DX:HR are) without the mod’s help. I found the Stun Gun much more accurate and reliable; plus, when you take them down, you’re a lot closer to the body and you can thus grab it and hide it somewhere before another enemy stumbles across it.

Faridah Malik: I have to admit that while I still think Megan is more physically attractive than Malik, I found Malik’s down-to-earth, supportive, “I’m here if you need me” attitude to be very compelling. She’s not Adam’s moral compass, not by a long shot, but out of everybody in the entire game, she’s the only person who genuinely feels like Adam’s friend.

18 mins in: How did you alert those guys? Because they heard the gunshots. :P Sound travels quite a LOOOOONG way in this game. (Which makes sense. If you’ve ever heard a real gunshot, you know just how loud it is.)

Oh, and Shamus? I never even noticed that until you mentioned it. You juvenile schoolboy, you. Tsk tsk. ;)

Im pretty sure that the trigger for the hostages is time you spend dicking around.I did all the conversation in my later walkthroughs as in my first one,but I sped through them instead of taking the time,and I still saved the hostages.

As for how he alerted the guys,that one guy saw him shooting the other guy while he was checking on the third guy.

I’ve never understood “installed” sunglasses. You still have skin behind them, which produces flakes, plus eyelashes, eyebrow hair, etc. If retracting them cleans them, he should be doing it once every two hours or so just from dust alone, never mind if he ever breaks a sweat.

I hate the pre-rendered cutscenes in this game. I have no clue why we’re playing this great looking 2011 RPG, and then we cut to some hideous, low-res PS2 era FMV. If your cutscenes look worse than your actual game, don’t pre-render them. It’s not hard, guys.

And I’ve played twice – there’s really nothing in the cutscenes that requires pre-rendering. Even the breaking glass that Adam gets thrown through could have been done using a canned animation Valve style.

“The side of Malik's airship says “800 B-EE”. The first time I saw it I read it as “BooBee”, which made me giggle in juvenile way. Someone please tell me I'm not the only one, or I'll be ashamed to have confessed this.”

Actually, when I looked at it I saw the number 800, then BEE–OOO!!–BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSS!!! :D

I instantly thought of Mumbles. Kinda a shame she’s not here for this. :/

When i went through i didn’t realize you could walk right by those first guys. By which i mean, i thought they were enemies. I chose “Give me Deus Ex” and i had just come off of Dark Souls, so i wasn’t taking chances.

By which i mean i rushed them without giving them a chance to do anything.

They’re really hard, for the record.

(Edit: Oh yeah, i also had the terrorists die on me. It felt really bad, too, because i didn’t understand what was going on or why they died. It wasn’t obvious to me that there was a timer, so i didn’t know what i did wrong. In fact, i didn’t realize how to save them until you pointed that out here in this very video. I guess it’s okay but i didn’t get any feedback on why they died and so i never “learned my less”. I was just punished and didn’t understand. I figured there was some alternate route i could have gone through to save them.)

Second point: i really like the closing music for this season. It’s just comical enough considering the tone of the game to be silly, but at the same time it still fits in with the game that it’s not jarring.

Third point: i really liked Malik. I know she’s all set up as a love interest or something, but i liked her. I didn’t feel like she was nerd bait, although maybe that just means she was more subtly nerd bait than Tali? I wish you could, like, ask her on a date or something. That would have been cool. (Although maybe Adam is a little too old? I’m not sure, i guess.)

Hmm… I wonder if I could pre-empt it with “somebody discusses Skyrim/Mass Effect 3?” There are good odds Skyrim may come up later in the season when most of the DX:HR subjects have already been covered and ME3 is almost certain to come up if the season lasts past the release date (unless it’s pushed further again)…

Interesting note: you can actually hop across the first room on the lights suspended from the ceiling. They’re actual, physical objects, and just close enough that you can jump from one to the next. It’s far more trouble than it’s worth, but possible.

Also, I’m quite happy with Josh’s approach – stealth as much as possible, but if discovered, deal with the enemies who’ve seen you. It’s the best way feasible, given that it has to be interesting for us to watch. I hope you continue finding neat little things to explore! (I think you got all three in the warehouse.)